Announcing Our New Editor!

April 21, 2008

Hello Visual Thesaurus subscribers: I'm pleased to announce we have appointed a new editor! His name is Ben Zimmer, and he comes to us from Oxford University Press, where he was editor for American dictionaries. Ben's very accomplished background is in linguistics and lexicography, and he blogs regularly at the respected Language Log. Ben also had a weekly column on the OUP blog called From A to Zimmer about words and usage. And if his name rings a bell, you're right! We published a fascinating interview with Ben last month about his work at OUP. We're extremely excited that Ben has joined our team. You'll see lots of new features and articles in the coming weeks, plus Ben will be working closely with the Visual Thesaurus team to continue developing our award-winning software.

And what about me? Since I joined the Visual Thesaurus as editor two years ago, we've built an amazing online magazine on language, the only one of its kind on the web. I'm extremely proud of our accomplishments. Besides my interest in language, though, I've also been writing about food and culture for the past several years, especially about Japanese cuisine. I'm now planning to move to Japan to learn more about the cuisine. I invite you to follow my exploits on my blog, the Japanese Food Report. Thank you for all your comments, email and support!

Interesting name, Zimmer. I live in England too, with a mother who lives in California, and recently when I tried to buy her a zimmer frame online, I realized that they don't call it that in the U.S. It's called a walker. It doesn't strike me as the sort of word that would be different in the U.S. None of my family in the U.S. have even heard of a zimmer frame.

Craig, I'm actually an American, despite the fact that my previous employer was based on the other side of the Pond. So "walker" is what I'm familiar with -- though British acquaintances have occasionally asked me if I'm related to the frame makers.